![]() ![]() ![]() Lincoln but also to Douglas and Breckenridge, it simply confirmed their clannish suspicion that politicking was a ruse designed to distract hardworking folk from their business. Their interests extended little farther than the borders of the seven acres, and their political views never grew more complex than Mama Larson’s dictum that “them that has, gets.” When in 1860 young Lee Larson suffered a fit of patriotism and scurried into town to cast his vote for John Bell, who promptly lost not only to Mr. The family grew enough corn to feed themselves and their four milk cows, harvested enough hemp to sell downriver to the southern cotton balers, and salted enough venison to keep their teeth from rattling loose in the winter. Their farm was tucked in a green wrinkle of land in the middle of the country, precisely where the nation’s heart would be if it were a living body, which troops on both sides of the Civil War had overlooked as they marched past. All the symptoms, in short, of a world still riddled with open doors.īut the Larson family was, on the whole, utterly disinterested in the goings-on of the wider world, and the wider world politely returned their sentiments. The European rebellions of 1848 hung like gun smoke in the air the sepoys of India could still taste mutiny on their tongues women whispered and conspired, sewing banners and authoring pamphlets freedmen stood unshackled in the bloodied light of their new nation. ![]() ![]() But other, older words-like chaos and revolution-still lingered in the margins. ![]()
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